HUNTER (The Corbin Brothers Book 1)

by Lexie Ray

  I got out of the shower without her help if only to escape her. She was so damn relentless, not letting up even as she followed me into the room in her damp underwear, thumbing makeup out from underneath her eyes.

  “Don’t you dare flop down on that bed.”

  “I’m flopping,” I said, “and there’s not a thing you can do about it.”

  “So help me, Christ—”

  “Go on, call God and Christ and all the angels,” I said, collapsing on the bed. “I’m tired, woman.”

  “You’re drunk and doped up. Not tired.”

  “Tired because I’m drunk and doped up.”

  “You’re not done with what I had planned today,” she said, sounding angry, but I couldn’t even coax my eyelids up to see her face flush with rage and find out if it made her even more beautiful in that flimsy bra and panty number. I was bone tired, unable to resist the substances I’d put in my body to put it to bed, not even for a pretty girl.

  “We’re done for today,” I told her, not caring that I was face up and naked in front of her, still dripping wet from the shower.

  “There will be hell to pay tomorrow, Hunter Corbin, if you do not get up from that bed this instant.”

  “That’s tomorrow’s problem,” I murmured, and that was the end of that.

  Chapter 3

  My nights were so often spent tossing and turning, sweating, my hands hovering over where my leg used to be, my brain trying to convince me that, in spite of what my eyes were seeing, my leg was still there, shattered and painful beyond words. If I did get sleep, it was usually peppered with nightmares of terrible memories and terrible things that hadn’t happened, my brain making no distinction between the worst of my past and the worst of my fears.

  If I had to decide, my brain was more my enemy than my missing leg. It was my brain that curled around that loss and convinced me all was lost. It was my brain that replayed the incident over and over in my mind until I had to drink and take pills to drive it out, to make my brain shut down for long enough so my body could recover from its onslaught.

  I woke up hungover but with no memory of my dreams—all in all, an excellent state of being. Even more surprising was that it was actually morning. I’d slept the entire day, evening, and night all the way through without a hint of a disturbing image to sully my slumber. I’d have to try and remember whatever it was I’d taken yesterday to give me such an excellent night’s sleep.

  What if it was Hadley?

  The thought was an errant one, one I examined for a handful of seconds before struggling to a sitting position. Christ. I’d forgotten about Hadley. I’d been so knocked out that she hadn’t even made an appearance in my dreams, though nothing good could’ve come out of that. My brain would have probably fooled me by starting off with a sex dream and ending with her head getting blown off or something.

  I was still naked, though I’d dried off long ago from the shower we’d shared. During the night, I’d yanked the cover partway over me, or someone else had done it out of pity. I doubted it had been Hadley. She’d been pissed.

  I rubbed my eyes and looked around at the mess my room was. She’d wanted me to clean it up, to go upstairs and take stock of my old room, to move back up there as a part of therapy, of an attempt at normalcy. Normalcy—that was a laugh. I was missing my leg. Nothing was going to be normal about my life ever again.

  But the way she’d touched my thigh, the one that ended so suddenly now, had suggested that Hadley thought it was perfectly normal. That didn’t make sense to me. My brothers told me they’d hauled my girlfriend—well, ex-girlfriend now—up to the hospital as soon as I’d been well enough to fly back home, and she’d cried and screamed so awfully they’d had to yank her right back out of there.

  That’s how normal I was. I had to remember that. Things that were normal for Hadley weren’t normal for the rest of the world. She was used to working with cripples and amputees and everyone else whose lives were fucked up beyond all recognition. That didn’t mean that if she could touch me without shuddering or crying, then anyone else would. My own brothers could barely look at me. I still had trouble fathoming it myself sometimes, waking up and being so sure that all of it had simply been a terrible nightmare—and then realizing I was still down a limb.

  I reached for my bottle of pills to ward off any early morning despair, but the bottle was empty. What the hell? I could’ve sworn there were still pills left when I went to sleep—or the last time I’d taken them anyway. I pushed myself up and pulled a pair of boxes on. They weren’t clean—not one piece of clothing in here was—but they were the closest that I could reach. I opened the drawer to the bedside table and rattled around in there, trying to find a bottle with pills inside. They were all empty, every last one of them. What was going on?

  I grabbed my crutch on the floor and hopped to the bathroom, trying to ignore the rise of panic inside my chest. There had to be some pills somewhere. I wasn’t going to be able to do it without them. I hadn’t gotten through a day without a substance since I’d been back stateside. I shouldn’t have to do it alone. Hadn’t I been through enough?

  The cabinet behind the side mirror was devoid of pills. All of the bottles were still there, lined up exactly as I’d left them, but there wasn’t a single pill inside of them. This was a nightmare. I was asleep. That’s what this was…except I was awake. My bladder reminded me of that fact. But when I turned toward the toilet, my mouth dropped open. Swimming in that dirty water, the filthy bowl that Hadley had complained about just yesterday, were all my missing pills. Most of them hadn’t even dissolved yet. They bobbed there, the capsules, while the tablets had sunk. This had to have just happened. Whoever had done this had wanted me to see it.

  “What the actual fuck!” I bellowed. Whomever it was had to still be here. If they wanted a reaction, I’d give them a fucking reaction. I hated myself for it, but I actually considered, for the briefest of moments, trying to dip my hand in that toilet bowl pill cocktail and salvage some of them. Maybe it wasn’t too late. Maybe there was still some time to dose myself against this day that was insisting on happening.

  “Oh, you’re awake.”

  I wheeled around to see Hadley leaning against the doorframe, looking smug as hell. I knew immediately that she was the one who did this to me. She was wearing a different outfit from yesterday—slacks and a blouse—which meant that she’d had time to go back to wherever she was from, concoct a plan of attack, and come back here to execute it, all while I’d been passed out in bed.

  “What the fuck do you think you’re doing? Don’t you know that I need those pills?”

  “See, that’s the thing,” she said. “You can cuss at me all you want, but I’m not convinced you actually need those pills.”

  “My name is on those bottles,” I said. “They were prescribed to me by an actual doctor. You’re just a physical therapist.”

  Her smile didn’t turn down a single watt. “That’s the thing, Hunter—a funny thing a lot of people don’t realize. Doctors are humans, too. Sometimes, they make mistakes. Other times, people manipulate them to get whatever they want. It’s a system that’s ripe for abuse. If you find the right doctor—or the wrong one, depending on how you’re approaching the issue—they’ll write a prescription just to get you out of the office, to move on to the next patient, trying to get through everyone they have to see in a day.”

  “That may be the case for some people, but not for me,” I said. “That’s not how it is.”

  “Then tell me how it is.”

  “You’re a physical therapist,” I said, doing my best to make my voice drip with disdain. “Not a therapist. Not a real doctor. If you want to tell me to do some sit-ups or something, then that’s your prerogative. I don’t have to stand around and talk to you about my medication.”

  “You do if that’s what I want,” Hadley said. “You do if I determine that your dependency on drugs is getting in the way of my work.”

  I laughed at her.
“Is that what you think this is? A dependency?”

  “You seem pretty desperate.”

  “Because I was taking those pills under the direction of my doctor. My actual doctor, mind you, and now they’re all in the toilet.”

  “Ah, yes.” Hadley walked past me and flushed. “I knew there was something I forgot to do. Put the toilet seat down, but forgot to flush. There’s always something.”

  “You think this is some goddamn joke.”

  “No, I don’t see anything to laugh about right now.”

  “I need those fucking pills. I have to call my doctor now, get him to phone the pharmacy, and then I need someone to pick them up for me.”

  “That’s not going to happen,” she informed me.

  “It is, and it’s going to happen pretty fucking immediately.”

  “Let’s be honest, here, Hunter,” Hadley said, dispassionate, all business even as I sweated and swore at her. “What is your pain like these days?”

  “What the fuck do you think it’s like?” I demanded, practically breathing fire in my desperate rage. “I’m missing a fucking leg.”

  “Yes, you have made it very clear that you’re missing a leg,” she said. “But that’s not what I asked. I want to know what kind of pain you’re in right now.”

  “A lot,” I barked at her.

  “A lot is subjective,” she said. “On a scale of one to ten, with one being no pain, and ten being pain that requires hospitalization, where would you place this current pain?”

  “Eight.”

  “Eight?” She sounded surprised—or dubious, maybe—her shapely eyebrows raised.

  “You asked me to rate it, and I did.”

  “Hunter, when I helped you in the shower yesterday, your thigh looked like it had healed nicely. It didn’t look like something that would be causing you pain at a level eight.”

  “Looks can be deceiving.”

  “Yes, they can. Could you describe the nature of your pain?”

  “Well…it hurts.”

  Hadley frowned. “Can you elaborate on that?”

  “It…really, really hurts?”

  She sighed. “I’m trying to understand why you might be feeling that level of pain. If you’re as specific as possible, I can try to pinpoint its source and tailor workouts to address it.”

  I gnawed on the inside of my cheek, well on the angry side of exasperated. “My head is pounding and my stomach is rolling.”

  “You can’t include your hangover on the pain scale,” she snapped, her sarcasm sharp as a knife. “I want to know about the pain in your thigh, at the site of the amputation, in your muscles connected to that area.”

  “It aches,” I fired back. “And sometimes I think my foot hurts. The foot I’m missing. I remember what it felt like when it was injured. When they thought they might still save the leg.”

  “What is the pain of your leg on the scale we previously discussed?”

  “It changes all the time.”

  “I want to know what it is right now.” On the surface, Hadley seemed collected and patient, her hands folded neatly in her lap, her lips pursed in interest, head cocked to the side. But those eyes couldn’t fool anyone. That green sparked and flashed, fed up with smelling my bullshit, challenging me to tell her the truth for once.

  “Five,” I said finally.

  “Really?”

  “Four.”

  “Are you going to keep going down if I keep questioning you?”

  “Three,” I snarled at her, “but that’s it. And that’s not accounting for the phantom pain, or the fact that I might puke on you right now, or that my head wants to jump out of my body.”

  Hadley’s eyes roamed over my body. “Or the fact that you’re trembling and sweating.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?” I asked.

  She pinched the bridge of her nose. “Let me guess. Some well-meaning doctor has been prescribing you pain pills ever since you got back stateside, am I right?”

  “I’ve been in pain, Hadley.”

  “But you’re not in pain now. You’re not in pain, and you continue to take pain pills.”

  I didn’t like her tone of voice—judgmental, like she knew so much more than I did, like she thought I was weak.

  “You should try losing a limb sometime,” I said. My hangover felt like it was getting worse by the minute, but that didn’t make sense. I needed some water and a Tylenol or five. Then some more sleep. Then I’d wake up feeling better. “It fucks with my head, Hadley. It would fuck with anyone. You’re off balance, and you can’t stop thinking about what happened and what a single moment took from you. Pain comes in a lot of different forms. I can’t just put it on a scale of one to ten. It’s a lot more complicated than that.”

  She’d lost that dubious look. I could tell I had her full attention. Good—maybe she’d realized she made a mistake throwing all my pills down the toilet. She’d write me a new prescription, if she had that power, or she’d find me someone who could.

  “Hunter, there are ways of addressing the things you’re feeling that are a lot more effective than opiates.”

  “I’ve been doing just fine. You’re the one who came in here thinking there’s something wrong.”

  “Incorrect. Your brother called me here because everything was wrong. Because he thought you’d be on the mend at home, but you just kept getting worse and worse instead.”

  “I don’t need anyone’s help,” I said. “No one here understands what I’m going through. You all are falling down over yourselves trying to judge me when no one gets it.”

  “Then let someone in. Explain to me why you’re taking pain pills if you’re not in any physical pain. How is that helping you?”

  I opened my mouth without any clear plan of what I was going to say, and then whirled around to the toilet, vomiting violently. I had to sink to my knee to support myself, and when I was finally done, I couldn’t so much as lift my arm to flush.

  “This is the worst hangover of my life,” I admitted, as Hadley did the dirty work for me.

  “It’s not a hangover,” she said. “It’s withdrawal.”

  “What?”

  “Your body has become dependent on opiates.” She offered me a hand, her mouth set in a grim line, and I sighed as I relied on her strength to regain my footing. The world spun, and I felt sicker than ever, but I managed to bite back the torrent begging to be released.

  “That’s what I was trying to tell you. I need the pills. I don’t feel right if I don’t take them.”

  “That’s addiction.” Hadley helped me to the bed.

  “You don’t understand. The doctor prescribed me the pills.”

  “I understand perfectly.” She piled pillows behind my head, ducked back in the bathroom, and returned with a damp washcloth that she passed perfunctorily across my forehead and torso. “Pain management is tricky. Your body and mind liked the way the pills made you feel. That’s why you continued to ask the doctor for them, and that’s why the doctor continued to prescribe them to you. Because you were reporting positive results, even if you were tricked into it.”

  “I feel like shit,” I said. “This is your fault.”

  “Yes, in a way,” she allowed. “But only because I stopped you from taking the pills. Your body needs them to continue functioning like it has been. To escape the influence of the opiates, you need to detox.”

  “Am I going to die?” I only half-joked.

  “You’re going to feel like you want to.”

  “You mean more than usual?”

  “That’s not funny, Hunter.”

  “None of this is.”

  Hadley disappeared into the bathroom again and re-emerged with the garbage can.

  “Your body is going to rebel,” she said. “You’re going to be feverish, shake, puke, and shit. I’ll be here to help you through it.”

  “Sounds like you have some experience,” I said, swallowing carefully. I didn’t want to puke into that garbage can,
especially when Hadley was still holding it. I didn’t want to puke into it at all.

  “Whether or not you accept it, I know what I’m talking about—thanks to the time I put into med school. You should just try to sleep. Sleep as much as possible, and we’ll get through this.”

  “What if I don’t want to?” I passed a trembling hand over my eyes. “You know, you were only hired to oversee my physical therapy. Who are you to run me through a detox?” My words were full of bravado, but deep down, I was shaking. I didn’t want to do this. I didn’t want to come out on the other side of this sober. When I was sober, everything was real. There was no way to cope with what had happened to me and the challenges I still faced. I wanted the pills. I wanted the booze. I didn’t want to feel the pain of my loss.

  “If you don’t do this, you’ll die,” Hadley said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “How many pills were you taking during a day? You’ll gradually build your tolerance—as I’m sure you’ve been doing—and need more and more. It’s the easiest thing in the world just to take one too many, and that’s all it takes. What would that say about you, Hunter, to make it through an IED in Afghanistan and be defeated by a pill back home?”

  “Don’t talk about things you don’t know about,” I said, too sick to put any real heat to my tone. “Just because Chance might’ve told you what happened…doesn’t mean you know anything about it.”

  “I would know more if you talked about it.”

  I wished she would leave well enough alone. The pills were a salve on an open wound, even if I had to take more and more every day. Who cared if I overdid it someday? Couldn’t that be my decision? It was so easy for everyone else to say how important it was for me to get better, but they weren’t the ones trapped inside this body. They had no idea what it felt like to live without a limb they’d had all their lives, to replay what had happened over and over again in their minds, to have to live with the fact that good people, people better than me, had died as a result of my mistake. No one understood that but me, and I should be allowed to do what I wanted to grapple with it.